The State of Local SEO: Industry Insights for a Successful&nbsp2019

A thousand thanks to the 1,411 respondents who gave of their time and knowledge in contributing to this major survey! You’ve created a vivid image of what real-life, everyday local search marketers and local business owners are observing on a day-to-day basis, what strategies are working for them right now, and where some frankly stunning opportunities for improvement reside. Now, we’re ready to share your insights into:

Google Updates

Citations

Reviews

Company infrastructure

Tool usage

And a great deal more...

This survey pooled the observations of everyone from people working to market a single small business, to agency marketers with large local business clients:

Respondents who self-selected as not marketing a local business were filtered from further survey results.

Thanks to you, this free report is a window into the industry. Bring these statistics to teammates and clients to earn the buy-in you need to effectively reach local consumers in 2019.

You might come away from that excellent survey believing that, since link building is so important, all local businesses must be doing it. But not so. The State of the Local SEO Industry Report reveals that:

When asked what’s working best for them as a method for earning links, 35% of local businesses and their marketers admitted to having no link building strategy in place at all:

And that, Moz friends, is what opportunity looks like. Get your meaningful local link building strategy in place in the new year, and prepare to leave ⅓ of your competitors behind, wondering how you surpassed them in the local and organic results.

The full report contains 30+ findings like this one. Rivet the attention of decision-makers at your agency, quote persuasive statistics to hesitant clients, and share this report with teammates who need to be brought up to industry speed. When read in tandem with the Local Search Ranking Factors survey, this report will help your business or agency understand both what experts are saying and what practitioners are experiencing.

Sometimes, local search marketing can be a lonely road to travel. You may find yourself wondering, “Does anyone understand what I do? Is anyone else struggling with this task? How do I benchmark myself?” You’ll find both confirmation and affirmation today, and Moz’s best hope is that you’ll come away a better, bolder, more effective local marketer. Let’s begin!

I think we're risking a lot to allow google to show too much local business. Without realizing it, we are accustoming the user to search the information ONLY in Google. We are giving the role of God almighty to Google. And with our SEO work we should not encourage small businesses to get in there. As they say here in Spain: this is bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.

You might be surprised at how many people share your concerns about Google's monopoly of local search (and search, in general). I've written about this in the past here on the blog, and appreciate the insight of the poignant saying you've shared. That being said, I am a dedicated supporter of local businesses and want them to achieve sustained success. Right now, the reality is that local businesses end up in local search results whether a business takes steps to be included or not. And to tell local business owners to intentionally ignore this or to try to exclude themselves from local results would be to ignore the reality of their very real need for visibility, reputation-building and revenue in order to compete and survive. So long as neighbors use Google to find local businesses, local businesses need to be found there.

Now, in my opinion, managing one's presence in Google's interface should not be the end of the story. Rather, I'm a strong advocate of simultaneously building non-Google-dependent revenue streams via real-world relationship building within the community a local business serves. You might like to read another recent blog post of mine that goes into this concept more thoroughly: https://moz.com/blog/local-customer-service-ecosys...

Thanks Miriam for your point of view. It's true, we're trapped! :) But we should always give alternatives to our clients or, even better, encourage different solutions thinking that we are a great community. Or Moz is not a big community? We are hundreds of thousands of webmaster / seo / agency that we know what we do and the long-term consequences of offering our customers "the easy way". Why not create (all together) an alternative that changes the rules of the game? We are many -> many ideas :)

Thank you, Restauranteschinos, for sharing your convictions. It would be great to see a genuine competitor to Google arise, but so far, no one has succeeded at this. Bing is an existing alternative, but its market share has remained small. For so many people Google *is* the "Internet". I really liked MapQuest when it first launched, but Google Maps has left it in the dust. Facebook has been a mighty sort of competitor, but unfortunately, like Google, they have been plagued with ethical scandals. Ditto with Amazon. I share your hopes for a more diverse and democratic playing field, and agree with you that marketers have a stronger ethical voice than they often use, but we'll have to see if anyone can actually build something that supplants Google. It hasn't happened yet, but for all I know, there is a 20-year-old sitting at her computer right now building it. Here's hoping ;)

Ironically Google is 20 years old )) But joking apart I hope serious competition develops soon. For too long Google have been able to take things in directions which suit them. Local search is very important however and will grow further.

Wow, 35% of local businesses having no link building strategy at all is pretty astounding. Definitely a good opportunity for those in the SEO & Content Marketing game! Our strategy has been primarily content development & manual link building (directories, content sharing sites, etc), and we have seen great results from it in our market. Thanks for sharing these results Miriam!

Link building is highly important. I think that small buisnesses don't do it because it takes a lot of time and effort. It looks like a easy thing, but we don't want to have backlinks from irrelevant sources, so i spend a lot of time searching valuable content, then i'm thinking about valuable for example comment and finally add my link. Finally it looks like I don't do anything important but I believe that one day I see results :)

Thank you for sharing your experiences with link building. I think local businesses actually have a unique advantage when it comes to this aspect of marketing, in that their real-world relationships with local brands and local media can lead naturally to very good unstructured linked citations. For example, we just had Small Business Saturday and if a local business was doing something especially newsworthy that day (like maybe having Santa Claus photos at their shop, a live band, free food) this could have made it into the online version of their local newspapers. Similarly, any day of the year is a good day for a business like a caterer who does weddings to write about the best local florists in town for wedding flowers. You're so right that seeing these opportunities does take time, but a good strategy can be well worth the effort!

An another article and information about Local SEO, this has to give us the idea of the important of it, thanks of the information. Local SEO is the pillar now to start in SEO even when your business is not so local at first

Local SEO is the thing which I have been looking to work more in 2019. With the continues change in Google Algorithms it is hard to focus on a single technique, we need to improve our methodologies with the time. Thanks for the nice article.

Link building is highly important. I think that small buisnesses don't do it because it takes a lot of time and effort.

Local SEO is the thing which I have been looking to work more in 2019. With the continues change in Google Algorithms it is hard to focus on a single technique, we need to improve our methodologies with the time.

Finally it looks like I don't do anything important but I believe that one day I see results :)

It looks like a easy thing, but we don't want to have backlinks from irrelevant sources, so i spend a lot of time searching valuable content, then i'm thinking about valuable for example comment and finally add my link.

Yeah that shocking that 35% of local business owners (who took the Moz survey) reported having no link building strategy at all. Crazy! Great findings and appreciate you sharing the survey results Miriam.

Data saturation is everywhere. We’ve often had the belief that more is better; however, that actually isn’t true in the case of data. The rapid rise in our ability to collect data hasn’t been matched by our ability to support, filter and manage the data. As an example, think about the first problem that people complain about when a city experiences great growth – the roads are too crowded. The infrastructure can’t keep up.

As we used to know that linkbuilding was very much vital for SEO Ranking. Still it carries load that without this we can not achieve good positions in SERP. So we should keep in our mind that create quality content(Text/Visual) & post them in a specific manner to get a good rank ultimately.

First Create fresh & quality content & then make a best plan to post them properly with some factors like timimg, platforms & circles of your working area.

Thanks a lot for this post & remind us the importance of backlinking in seo services!

Hello everybody. I see that local seo is more important each day, and more serps have the local snippet. So everybody that has a local business should focus on this, because it is a really good opportunity for everyone.